The baby Bumrah era

Bumrah celebrates after taking a wicket during the third Test against Australia at Melbourne Cricket Ground on December 28, 2018

In his 1st year of Test cricket, he has improved with every series. His creativity and ambition match with an unusual self-assurance

After the England series last year, one of my favourite cricket journalists, Sharda Ugra, mulled over the value of being the best away team in an era of indifferent travellers. “Truly great, epoch-defining cricket teams dominate worldwide,” she wrote. Ravi Shastri, coach of the Indian men’s cricket team, has said that the 2018 squad was the greatest Indian team of the past 15 years. Kohli captained an exciting, exceptionally talented and ambitious team, no doubt. But the greatest?

We could mumble all we like about problems with the toss, with playing conditions, or with what is now, irritatingly, referred to as the “leadership group”, as though it were an advisory council at the United Nations. But “we will not have to be told what is what” when in the presence of true greatness, Ugra wrote. “We will know.”

She was right, and I know it because when I saw Jasprit Bumrah bowl a 111 kmph yorker to Shaun Marsh on the third day of the Boxing Day Test at Melbourne Cricket Ground, I immediately knew what was what. No Indian cricketer has had a better calendar year than Bumrah. The reasons for that are now well-known: It’s his first year of Test cricket. He has improved with every series. His creativity and ambition seem to have been matched with unusual self-assurance for a bowler with little previous experience of cricket’s big challenges.

It’s not just confidence or bravado, two qualities fast bowlers like to show off when the going’s good for them. Someone on Twitter commented that Bumrah looked like he could be an Allan Donald and it wasn’t even a joke. You don’t get to evoke that comparison by being cocky. The conditions for such a comparison were created by the fact that Bumrah has been unsettling for every batsman who has faced him this year, whether or not he got them out. To be sure, his fellow pacers have all stressed out their opponents to varying degrees at some point or other this year. But they’re not playing their first year of Test cricket.

After a hiccup when he started for India against South Africa last January, Bumrah surprised and delighted us. Just two weeks ago, this column picked his five-for in the third Test of that series as one of 2018’s highlights in Indian sport. He has fought and beaten injury, and in doing so, reassured us of his resilience. That is an important consideration in a team whose history is haunted by anxieties over the fitness of fast bowlers. He’s a learner: his little problem with keeping his foot within the crease is ceasing to be a problem before our very eyes.

Then there are the statistics, little oranges in the toes of a Christmas stocking. The most wickets an Indian bowler has taken in this calendar year; the only one to have taken five-wicket hauls in England, South Africa and Australia; the best-ever performance by an Indian fast bowler in Australia. He now ranks behind Curtly Ambrose and Terry Alderman in the list of bowlers with the most Test wickets in his debut year. Both of them achieved their records over a decade before he was born.

Ben Jones, an analyst for CricViz, noted that batsmen facing Bumrah edged or missed deliveries once every four balls. He has more wickets than South Africa’s Kagiso Rabada — of whose greatness we don’t need to be persuaded — across all three formats in 2018. If you weren’t paying attention (and I fully confess I looked at his IPL record only in retrospect), no worries: he’s already good at the stuff they’re giving out trophies for in 2019.

Last January, his inswinger to Faf du Plessis at the Wanderers made the South African captain look like a man made of stone, his stump castling behind him. Bumrah managed it neatly. His run-up was short. His celebration was muted: genuine but business-like. If there was any special effort, it was only visible in his action — as many others have noted, he appears to be hyper-flexible. He looked honestly great to me in that moment, but that’s not important: greatness isn’t a matter of a single moment.

More than anything else, in that moment, Bumrah looked ready. He didn’t yet have the stats, the consistency, the sense that he was going to make being dangerous a habit over the next five or six away tests. He just looked like a man who could not be surprised by his own ability to decide a match. At the end of the year, that slow ball, so straightforward yet so cunning, made Shaun Marsh look like a man made of lumber. Touch stone and touch wood. Let’s not jinx things by saying he’s going to be great. He’s going somewhere. He’s taking us with him.

■ SUPRIYA NAIR The halfway line: on the intersection of sports and life

■ Bumrah has fought and beaten injury, and in doing so, reassured us of his resilience

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